Platforms for Growth

Fast and Flexible Platforms Ignite Otto's Digital Transformation

OTTO is Germany's number one eCommerce fashion and lifestyle company. The family owned retail giant sells clothing, toys, consumer electronics, homewares and more across 20 countries and posts revenues to the tune of $2.56BN.

OTTO hasn’t stood still in 65 years. They kicked off in 1949 with nothing but a hand glued catalogue and 28 pairs of shoes. In 1963 they were one of the first to take phone orders and in 1995 they launched eCommerce in the same year as Amazon.

We knew Otto was too slow to react to market needs, and now we were looking for someone to help us solve these problems

Peter Wolter, Head of eCommerce Technology and Solutions, OTTO

A new era

OTTO needed to reinvigorate its eCommerce strategy. The monolithic platform they were using lacked flexibility and speed.

They partnered with ThoughtWorks to create a more nimble eCommerce machine. Together OTTO and ThoughtWorks implemented Agile processes, architecture and technology to create an adjustable platform that meets OTTO’s long term growth and business needs. A Microservices architecture was used so OTTO can quickly add new capabilities and decommission redundant ones easily over time.

Upgrades were incremental. The launch of the new platform was not disruptive to the business. No downtime, no extra shifts. For millions of shoppers the re-engineering was invisible. For Otto the benefits are immense. Time to market for new features has been compressed from months to minutes.

Now eCommerce represents 80% of total revenue and OTTO can reinvent itself every day.

Since we had small and lightweight increments of changes, we have lost our fear of moving forward. For example, it's far easier for us to get to mobile